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What is Trump's Gaza playbook?
Ian Bremmer's Quick Take: Want to talk about Gaza, which has not been as much in the headlines over the past month because so much other news has been emanating from Washington post Trump's inauguration. But he made some news on Gaza and it's relevant to the ongoing war and ceasefire, which is this idea that the United States is going to take over Gaza, develop it and make it into the Riviera, a new Riviera on the Mediterranean. Certainly they have the beachfront property, they don't have the infrastructure, especially not after the war over the last year plus. Trump saying that no US troops would be involved, but it's an enormous opportunity. The Palestinians would have to be resettled. It's not a new plan. He's been talking about this for the last year together with advisors. The idea that there's an enormous amount of money, particularly from the Gulf, that could be interested in investing on the ground. That security could be provided by the Egyptians. That the Palestinians could be temporarily resettled in Egypt, maybe in Jordan.
They would, at least in principle, have the right to return. But I mean, how much money? Probably $20 billion minimum. What's temporary mean? Probably talking about a generation. Are the Palestinians likely to believe that given what's happened on the ground in the West Bank? Hard to imagine. What does governance for the Palestinians look like? Well, Trump no longer supports a two-state solution, which he did support back in the days of the Abraham Accords. Others in the region certainly do, and they, at least in principle though, they're not willing to do an awful lot to bring that about. Of course, the two-state solution, if you are Arab in the region, doesn't necessarily mean democratic governance after all, with the exception of Israel. It's not like you have democratically elected governments across these states. So you're probably talking about something more technocratic and appointed. But still, what's happened is as Trump has been discussing this, the Jordanians and the Egyptians are unhappy and saying, "No way will they take any Palestinians."
The Gulf states are unhappy. The UAE, which has discussed some of this plan with Israel directly, slow rolling how much they'd be willing to do. The Saudis saying they don't support it. And so Trump with all of that and with Prime Minister Netanyahu coming to Washington DC said, "Fine, I'll make an announcement by myself. I'll just do it if you refuse to be a part of it." And then the US diplomats were spending day and night back channeling with Gulf allies saying, "He didn't really mean he was going to take over all of it. He's not planning on taking over the land. Don't worry about it." What I would say is this is an opening strategy to try to get all of the states in the region together with Israel and negotiate what the development of Gaza would possibly look like. To get some commitments for investment. To get some commitments for security.
And there's a lot of space between all of the Palestinians are resettled because certainly they're not all interested in leaving. But some of them certainly are. And you can hardly blame them even though it's their homeland because there is nothing left and it's really hard to get humanitarian aid in, and it's not likely to get meaningfully better, even with the ceasefire, which may not hold up anytime soon. And given the fact that 80% of Israelis polled in the Jerusalem Post, which is a pretty middle of the road survey group and media institution in Israel, say they want all of the Palestinians in Gaza resettled. Given that and given the fact that if you were to engage in reconstruction that security would be necessary, there's going to be an effort to at least create buffer zones, which means more resettlements internally and a desire to allow Palestinians that want to leave the ability to leave.
And Trump would love to create some facts on the ground there. The way he's creating facts on the ground by bringing some illegal migrants in the United States to Guantanamo. There aren't facilities for them, so they set up some tents. But even if it's only one or two planes, suddenly it becomes a policy. And that's precisely what the Trump administration wants to see with the Palestinians and Gaza is that if you are getting out a few busloads or a few shiploads or a few plane loads, then suddenly it's not a question of can they be resettled, but how many and over what time? It's a very different policy discussion, and that's exactly where they and the Israeli government are looking to get to. Now, who's going to take these Palestinians? Right now nobody. Trump was asked if he was going to be willing to, if the United States what his response was, "Well, it's really too far," which doesn't seem to be his perspective for the white Afrikaners in South Africa who are even farther away.
So maybe it's not really about distance. It might be something else. But nonetheless, I do expect that when Trump says that the Egyptians and Jordanians will take some, that if they are paid to take some and what some means and what kind of population and how they're going to be vetted is all to be discussed. But some would not surprise me at all, might be a matter of hundreds or a few thousand. I don't think it's a matter of hundreds of thousands. But again, it starts that conversation. It changes the policy. And especially if we end up reopening the fighting in Gaza, which I think is quite likely over the coming weeks and months, then there becomes more urgency to engage for some of the Palestinians there in more resettlement, more willingness to. So that's what I think this is all about right now.
We are not close to a Palestinian state. We are not close to a broad agreement that would allow the Gulfies to engage fully in what Trump is demanding or to expand the Abraham Accords, to include Saudi Arabia opening diplomatic ties with Israel. But all of this is on the table and is the backdrop for what Trump is putting forward right now. So that's what we're talking about and something we'll be watching really closely. Hope everyone's doing well, and I'll talk to you all real soon.
Gaza ceasefire likely as Biden and Trump both push
Ian Bremmer shares his insights on global politics this week on World In :60.
A Gaza ceasefire has gained momentum. What is the likelihood a deal will be reached soon?
We've heard this news before. At least five times over the last year that we've heard we were almost at a Gaza ceasefire. This time around though it looks much more likely. Why is that? Because Trump is about to be president, because Trump's envoys and Biden's envoys have been working together on these issues, and also because that means pressing the Israeli government in a way that feels much more serious if you are the prime minister. And also because Trump has been pressing Hamas. And so, I think the unilateralism is there. The fact the deal was already very close, and now this means Biden gets to say he got the deal and Trump gets to say he's ended a war, at least for the time being, and a lot more hostages get freed. So yeah, this time around it looks pretty likely.
What do I make of a potential sale of TikTok to Elon Musk?
Well, it's just been announced that the Chinese are considering it. I always thought that it was more likely than not that if the Supreme Court were to uphold a ban that the Chinese would probably allow a sale to go through. Though they were going to say they were never going to until the last moment because why give up leverage when you don't necessarily have to? So their historic unwillingness doesn't mean to me that they're actually unwilling. To the extent that there is a deal and it goes to Elon, he becomes more powerful, and he also is seen by the Chinese as owing them one. So would he facilitate an improved, a more stable relationship between the US and China? It's an early indication that he could play a role. He hasn't said anything on the China front yet, but certainly you would expect that he would meet with the high-level envoy that's going to the inauguration that Xi Jinping was invited to on the 20th. That's what we should watch in the next week. Okay, that's it for that one.
What does Lebanon's new president mean for Hezbollah?
Weaker Hezbollah, but so much is going to be determined on what Israel decides to do on the ground in the south of Lebanon. Are they staying there for a longer period of time? We've heard news of late that they intend to maintain that occupation in a longer than just couple of weeks, couple of months environment, which makes it harder to keep Hezbollah from starting fighting again. On balance, I think this ceasefire is looking a little shakier right now, even with the new Lebanese president than it had a few weeks ago. We'll see. But if it does break down, the level of fighting won't be what it was a few months ago because Hezbollah doesn't have that capacity and the Iranians can't restock their weapons because Assad has fallen in Syria.
FILE PHOTO: Palestinian children walk past the rubble of houses, destroyed in previous Israeli strikes, amid the Israel-Hamas conflict, in Khan Younis, southern Gaza Strip, January 7, 2025.
Trump deadline looms over Gaza peace talks
The war in Gaza took center stage Tuesday atPresident-elect Donald Trump’s second press conference since his election in November. Trump repeated earlier statements he made in December – which were applauded by Israel – that “if those hostages aren’t back by the time I get into office, all hell will break out in the Middle East.” He didn’t elaborate.
WhileHamas and Israel have been in ceasefire discussions mediated by Qatar and Egypt, there has been little progress, with Hamas reiterating its demands to halt the war in exchange for any hostage deal.
Meanwhile, theUAE is spearheading discussions with the US and Israel to establish a provisional government for Gaza after the cessation of hostilities. One scenario would have the administration, security, and reconstruction of Gaza overseen by a group of nations including the UAE and the US, after Israel withdraws its forces and until a“reformed” Palestinian Authority is installed in the territory. It wouldalso include “an explicit commitment to the two-state solution” from Israel, and a “clear leadership role by the US.”
But officials involved said that the proposals were not fully fleshed out and had not been approved by any government. While the Palestinian Authority – helmed by Mahmoud Abbas for 20 years, as of this Thursday – has suggested an openness to reforms in years past, neither the PA nor Israel has issued a comment about the UAE’s proposal. Meanwhile, Israel’s parliament rejected the creation of an independent Palestinian state last July.
We’re watching whether Trump’s deadline spurs the parties to find a resolution – and what his vision of America’s post-war involvement would be.
Section of James Turrell's "Leading" 2023, in New York City.
Opinion: Colors, Ta-Nehisi Coates, and the use of your eyes
A few days ago, I went to see a James Turrell installation on a rooftop in lower Manhattan. If you don’t know his work, Turrell is an American artist whose primary medium is colored light.
This particular installation is an immaculate white room with a perfect, knife-edge square cut through the ceiling, open to the elements. As the color of the room lighting changes, so does the color of the sky above, which appears as a perfect, depthless square of steadily shifting hue. The contrasting effect is hypnotic.
As a small group of us sat on simple wooden benches around the perimeter looking upward, the architect who worked with Turrell on the installation said, “the great thing about this is that you don’t need to know anything beforehand for this to work. You just need to use your eyes.”
You just need to use your eyes.
What our eyes are sufficient for has been on my mind lately, particularly as I’ve been reading Ta-Nehisi Coates’ new book “The Message.”
In it, Coates – known for his lyrical, polemical writing about race, power, and racism – travels to South Carolina, where he meets a teacher fighting a local ban of one of Coates’ earlier books; to Senegal, where he explores his relationship to Africa as a descendant of African slaves; and to Israel, where he spends 10 days chronicling both Palestinian dispossession and Israeli narratives of history.
All three sections explore the dangers of mythmaking and utopian thinking – for everyone, white, Black, Jewish – and the ways in which the powerful everywhere weave elaborate stories to justify the oppression of the powerless.
But the section on Palestine has drawn the most attention and the most ferocious criticism, as many people learned from the controversy surrounding CBS morning anchor Tony Dokoupil's spicy on-air exchange with Coates about it.
It begins at Jerusalem’s Yad Vashem Holocaust memorial and traces a tragic arc from the near extermination of the Jews to the redemptive foundation of an Israel that has inflicted its own violence and dispossession on the Palestinians. For Coates, the occupation of the West Bank echoes the Jim Crow South and Apartheid South Africa.
There is a lot to grapple with in the book, and there have been many critiques – Coates’ decision to recount Jewish massacres of Palestinians without telling any stories of Arab violence or terrorism against Jews; the relative absence of Palestinian voices in a book that itself (rightly) calls for more Palestinian representation in media; the grafting of an American-style racial paradigm of race and power onto Israel’s ethnic and sectarian hierarchies in a way that doesn’t quite fit.
But one particular charge against Coates bothers me: that he leaves out too much context or that he doesn’t have the authority to speak on this issue as a non-expert.
No, Coates is not a historian or a scholar of the Middle East. And no, he doesn’t speak the local languages: In the audio version of the book, his repeated butchering of the words knafeh and Al-Aqsa will drive Arabic speakers up the wall.
But he does have eyes.
When you go to the West Bank – I have been there just once, alone, for a few weeks in 2008 – you are immediately confronted with a striking degree of systemic inequality, a world that does not often make the air in US media: the effectively segregated highways, the shrinking access to land and water that is left to the Palestinians, the checkpoints that may or may not let Palestinians through on any given day.
“Even our mental geography has been shattered,” I remember a photojournalist from Nablus telling me. “If I want to visit my mother in Khalil [the Arabic name for Hebron], I don’t know if it will take me two hours, two days, or if I’ll be able to get there at all.”
It is, very clearly and observably, as Coates writes, “a place where no Palestinian person is ever the equal of any Jewish person, ever.”
There is context, of course. And context is important for many reasons. If we want to solve problems, we have to know how they came to be. If we want to change people’s minds or policies, we have to understand the chain of experiences and decisions that brought them to where they are.
But there are ways in which “context,” or the constant demand for more of it, can become a kind of deliberate diversion, a way of obscuring things rather than clarifying them. What Coates calls “the elevation of factual complexity over self-evident morality.”
If a terrorist group goes on a rampage killing innocent people, you cannot appeal to context to excuse the immorality of their crimes. If one people systematically discriminates against another group of people, dispossessing and destroying them, you cannot simply take refuge in the idea that “it’s complicated.”
Whenever the dignity and security of actual human beings are at stake, the purpose of context should be to illuminate responsibility rather than to obscure it.
There are times when you should just use your eyes.
Secretary of State Antony J. Blinken meets with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu in Tel Aviv, Israel, Monday, August 19, 2024.
Blinken urges Netanyahu to ‘capitalize’ on Hamas leader’s death
The FBI on Tuesday announced it’s investigating a leak of US intelligence documents that offer details on Israel’s potential plans for retaliation against Iran over its missile attack earlier this month. The highly classified documents were shared on an Iran-linked Telegram account.
The leak puts the US in an awkward position as the intelligence pertains to spying on an ally. It’s not uncommon for governments to gather intel on allies, but such activities can still be embarrassing when revealed.
As the Biden administration scrambles to discover how the documents were leaked, it’s also pushing for a cease-fire in the Middle East amid Israel’s ongoing conflicts with Hezbollah and Hamas. Israel is reportedly considering an Egyptian plan for a two-week cease-fire with Hamas, which would see half a dozen hostages exchanged in the process. It’s possible a smaller agreement like this could gain momentum after months of failed international efforts to secure a lasting peace.
US Secretary of State Antony Blinken met with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu in Israel on Tuesday and urged him to capitalize on the recent death of Hamas leader Yahya Sinwar “by securing the release of all hostages and ending the conflict in Gaza in a way that provides lasting security for Israelis and Palestinians alike.”
We’ll be watching to see if the US reveals more about the source of the leak and whether Israel shows any signs of accepting a cease-fire proposal.
What Sinwar's death means for the war in Gaza
Ian Bremmer shares his insights on global politics this week on World In :60.
BRICS Summit: A "new world order" or already a relic of the past?
Neither. It's in Kazan in Russia. So, I mean, the big issue is that the fact that Putin is hosting it hasn't stopped people from showing up, and that says a lot about the state of the non-West. If you're not in the G7, you're still finding ways to work with the Russians, and that's not going to change anytime soon. But it is not an alternative to the G7. It's a large grouping, and they have different political, different economic systems. They want to work with everybody. So we're not heading towards a new Cold War, at least not in terms of the big global architecture.
Is Sinwar's death the beginning of the end of the war in Gaza?
I think it is in terms of Israel's military fighting, because they've killed the leadership, they've blown up the tunnels, they've found the arms caches. I mean, there's not much else for them to do. But I mean, the war from the Palestinian perspective is just beginning. They are utterly devastated. They have no ability to have a future for themselves or their kids, and they are going to be fighting for generations. So right now, it doesn't matter much to Israel because they're massively asymmetrically powerful from a military perspective, but long-term this is not something that we're going to be able to forget about.
Yankees versus Shohei Ohtani, I mean Dodgers. Who's winning?
Well, I mean, that is funny of course, because here in Japan everyone has Ohtani fever. You cannot avoid it everywhere you walk. It is pretty exciting. They are the two teams that I wanted to see in the World Series, and I think it's going to be a fascinating week and a half or whatever it is. And I wish... I mean, I tend to root for the Red Sox, which means not rooting for the Yankees. That means I kind of want the Dodgers to win. But at the end of the day, I love sports because a minute after the game is over, I am no longer super excited. And I wish that could be the way that politics work.
Anyway, be good and I'll talk to you all real soon.
U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken boards a plane, en route to the Middle East, as he departs Joint Base Andrews, Maryland, U.S., October 21, 2024.
US pushes for Middle East cease-fire ahead of Election Day
With exactly two weeks before Election Day in the US, the Biden administration is pushing for cease-fires in Israel’s wars with Hezbollah in Lebanon and Hamas in Gaza.
US envoy Amos Hochstein visited Beirut on Monday as part of this effort. Hochstein said that both sides “simply committing” to UN resolution 1701, a peace agreement that followed the 2006 Israel-Hezbollah war, “is not enough” and called for a formula “that brings an end to this conflict once and for all.”
Meanwhile, Secretary of State Antony Blinken is en route to Israel, where he is expected to meet with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and President Isaac Herzog on Tuesday as part of a renewed push for a Gaza cease-fire.
While achieving a cease-fire on either front could potentially boost Kamala Harris’s campaign, the likelihood of this happening before Nov. 5 appears slim. The US and other international negotiators have pushed for a cease-fire for months, without luck.
Israeli airstrikes continued to pound Lebanon and Gaza over the weekend, and the region is still bracing for Israel’s response to Iran’s Oct. 1 missile attack.
We’ll be watching to see if the US can make any progress, but recent history suggests it will be an uphill battle.
A global leadership void and ongoing wars
Ian Bremmer's Quick Take: Hi, everybody, Ian Bremmer here, and a Quick Take to kick off your week. I am here in Tokyo, Japan. Just got back from Beijing. Being in this part of the world has me thinking a little bit about the state of our world and leadership, or should I say, the lack thereof. Those of you following me know I talk about a G-zero world, not a G-7, not a G-20, a place where we lack global leadership, and that has been so clear, thinking about the wars that continue, between Israel and Palestine, and now Lebanon, and more broadly in the Middle East, and between Russia and Ukraine, and increasingly NATO in Europe.
I think about the fact that all over the world, everyone wants these wars to be over. They're causing enormous amounts of suffering, displacement of human beings, massive war crimes, but they persist. It's worth thinking about what that means in terms of leadership because when we talk about the Middle East, and Israel-Palestine in particular, the United States is the most powerful ally of Israel, overwhelmingly in terms of its political and diplomatic support, its economic support, technological support, its military aid and training and intelligence. And yet, over the last year, the United States has had virtually no influence in the ability to contain, constrain, or end this war, irrespective of all the suffering.
You can complain about the United States on that with good reason, but then you look at Russia-Ukraine, and you see that over the last three years, China's been, by far, the most powerful friend and supporter of Russia, massive amounts of trade only expanding and dual-use technologies and diplomatic support. Yet, despite that, China has been unwilling to use any influence on Russia to try to bring the war to the end.
Now, to be clear, both the United States and China say all the right things. In Beijing, I was hearing from the leaders that they're friends with the Ukrainians and they maintain stable relations, and of course they want the war over, and they respect Ukrainian territorial integrity. And of course, the Americans support a two-state solution for the Palestinians and want to ensure that they get humanitarian aid and want to see a ceasefire happen, but I mean, the revealed preferences of both of these countries is their willingness to do anything about it is virtually zero. The Chinese don't care about the Ukrainians ultimately. That's what we're learning over the last few years. The Americans don't care about the Palestinians ultimately. That's what we've learned over the last year.
Absent leadership from the two most powerful countries in the world, where do you think we're going to get geopolitically? The answer is, to a much more dangerous place. That's the concern. I don't see that changing, particularly whether we have a Harris or a Trump presidency. I don't see that changing whether we have a Xi or a Xi presidency in China. It's not like they're making any real choices going forward. But look, maybe I'll be surprised. And certainly, it would be nice if no matter who wins, this was a topic of conversation between the Americans and the Chinese. That, "Hey, China. If you'd be willing to do a little bit more with Russia, we'd be willing to do a little bit more with Israel." I mean, frankly, at the end of the day, that's the kind of horse-trading I think we could really use diplomatically. Right now, that's a conversation that hasn't happened yet, but maybe it will.
That's it for me, and I'll talk to y'all real soon.